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Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity Benefits

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Sharing information resources on ecosystem services and biodiversity in the African Great Lakes helps foster collaborative and more strategic efforts.

There are many existing partnerships, plans, reports, decision tools and other valuable information resources that can help inform strategic decision making to address ecosystem services and biodiversity. On this page we bring these information resources together with brief descriptions and direct links to help you quickly find those resources that meet your individual needs.

In May 2017, the African Great Lakes Conference: Conservation and Development in a Changing Climate was held in Entebbe, Uganda. This conference sought to increase coordination, strengthen capacity, inform policy with science, and promote basin-scale ecosystem management in the region. Because all of the African Great Lakes cross borders, the benefits they offer and the challenges they face are best managed at a basin-wide level.

Members of this project will host an applied, collaborative workshop which creates lake committees on each of the African Great Lakes. Each lake committee will consist of relevant freshwater experts to harmonize and prioritize research, guide regional research efforts, and facilitate communications between partner countries to positively affect freshwater policy and management using regular in-person meetings, the African Great Lakes Inform, and other relevant means.

The 2017 African Great Lakes Conference, Entebbe, Uganda resolved to advance the African Great Lakes Information Platform (AGLI) (this platform) established by The Nature Conservancy. AGLI was created to promote research and collaboration and support decision-making to ensure the inter-generational sustainability of the lakes and their basins. AGLI will be hosted at the University of Nairobi and managed jointly with the African Center for Aquatic Research and Education.

Despite the efforts conservationists trying to protect and conserve indigenous plant and animal life in Eastern Africa, the destruction of natural habitats is continuing. In many cases this destruction leaves behind degraded sites which require replacement of lost elements of the original ecosystem. Habitat restoration techniques can now be employed to repair damage to the diversity and dynamics of original ecosystem processes that sustain life on earth. The need for habitats restoration is one of the key areas of activities recommended in the Convention on Biological Diversity.

This project aims to improve understanding of the importance of wetlands, highlighting the ecological and economic value of Ruvubu National Park through trainings on ecosystem services assessments and identification of biodiversity and ecosystem services characteristics and spatial trends.

The UNDP-UNEP Poverty Environment Initiative worked with the Government of Malawi to create revised policies for fisheries and forestry in order to produce better management of resources and encourage sustainable livelihoods. The project encouraged the government to engage stakeholders from various community groups in drafting the policies, which allowed local community leaders to provide a voice and offer their unique insights on how the policies should be shaped.

Lake Victoria and its basin are comprised of enormous areas of permanent and seasonal small water bodies that have been singled out as important faunal reservoirs for the endangered and threatened native species of Lake Victoria. Two tilapiine fish Oreochromis esculentus and O. variabilis are endemic and were the most commercial species in the lake fishery in early 1900s. Pressure on the fisheries and introduction of new fish species caused a severe decline of these species from the lake.

Lake Victoria has one of the highest endemic fish species-area-relationships of any freshwater bodies in the world. More than 90% of this diversity is composed of haplochromine cichlids that have undergone an evolutionary radiation in the region into more than 700 endemic species in the past 100,000 years. These species belong to more than 20 different major ecological guilds from large benthic and small pelagic herbivores at one end of the consumer food web to inshore and pelagic fish predators at the other end.